Ever wonder why you’re more likely to see highlights of high school football than world championship boxing on Sportscenter?
This should come as no surprise to hardcore boxing fans, but the rest of the sports world doesn’t take our sport seriously, doesn’t take us seriously, and snickers at the idea that boxing is even a sport anymore.
Back in ’91, I did a college internship for a talk radio station that shared studio space with a sports talk crew. The Hagler-Hearns t-shirt I occasionally wore under my obligatory 90’s grunge flannel might as well have been a Hulkmania t-shirt in the eyes of the backwards baseball-capped crew. To them, a group so anally focused on sports stats that they could rattle off career NCAA stats, there were four, maybe five boxers who even mattered. And, even so, they really weren’t worth mentioning in any serious manner. I can only imagine what these same types of sports nerds think of boxing now.
So, how did boxing go from being a mainstream, front page sport to a complete and total afterthought over the course of just one generation? Blame these bottom-feeding slugs:
